John Hamer took charge of agriculture business Monsanto’s corporate venturing unit within Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV) at the end of 2012.
This was a year after Stephen Padgette assumed his current role in Monsanto’s global strategy group in 2011 as vice-president for R&D investment strategies, including corporate venturing and biological business startups.
Earlier this year, MGV revealed its portfolio as stage-agnostic, investing from seed to later-stage in developers of technology related to the pharmaceutical, chemical or consumer sectors. It said it had led or co-led all but two of the 11 investments it had made in startups.
The unit’s digital agriculture portfolio includes US-based land management software provider AgSolver; Blue River Technology, a US-based developer of software that organises weeding and herbicide application; US-based irrigation recommendation platform HydroBio; and Estonia-based farm management system developer Vital Fields.
MGV has funded two companies developing agricultural productivity technology, investing in Arvegenix, a US-based startup modifying field pennycress into a cover, energy and feed crop, and Nimbus-Ceres, a US-based agricultural fungicide joint venture with biotechnology company Nimbus Therapeutics.
Other portfolio companies include US-based biological chemical product developers Preceres, AgBiome, RaNA Therapeutics and PivotBio, and Plant Response Biotech, a Spain-based startup working on products and microbes to improve crop yield and health.
Before he was investment director at Monsanto, Hamer was a managing director at Burrill & Co for nine years and was chief executive of Arete Therapeutics and Paradigm Genetics. He was a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University and a visiting scientist at DuPont. He has a PhD in microbiology from University of California Davis, and studied biology and biological sciences at University of Windsor.